Posts Tagged ‘biology’

It’s harder to find hands-on activities for high school than for elementary, but just because you are homeschooling teens doesn’t mean that your day has to be boring and tedious. Everyone learns better by doing–this is true for practical skills like driving and cooking, but also for academic knowledge like science and history. Take a look at our enormous list of fun hands-on activities for high school!

Hands-on High School Science Activities

High school sciences naturally lend themselves to hands-on activities because of the lab work required. But as you can see in the following list, you can also have fun with food, field trips, LEGOs, and even comedy to bring your science to life!

Human Anatomy

13 exclusive high school anatomy videos in the Vault, covering a full year of high school anatomy with every body system covered with hands-on activities!

Hands-on High School History Activities

Each of these activities are applicable to high school ancient history, even though we did many of them before the kids were teens. You would just expect more detail on each of the projects, and maybe a demonstration of the projects in front of a group of peers studying the same time period:

I hope you enjoyed this huge list of hands-on activities for high school! Come back to this page often, as I will be adding more posts, including some new high school government posts with video demonstrations!

As the culminating activity for our year of high school biology, we decided to do a fun and corny Biology Comedy Show. We performed it during my son’s amoeba birthday party. You can take a look at the amoeba cake we ate, the live amoebas we looked at through the microscope, and the Lego bacteria my son put together.

My husband put up a green screen behind our Biology Comedy Show, so that we could superimpose some amoeba footage that my son had captured earlier. The whole family was involved in the show. You will hear sounds from the audience who was watching, especially during the charades section of the show, where my son acted out various topics from biology. The whole show is less than five minutes, even though it took us a year to accumulate all the jokes.

If you enjoyed this comedy show, I recommend you go watch our other corny comedy show: Ancient Rome Comedy Show. We performed it years ago when my kids were younger.

If you are a homeschooling family who is studying biology, I highly recommend joining the Unit Study Treasure Vault, which has tons of biology videos in it. I filmed everything we did for our high school biology in our family, and I show you how to modify the topics for younger siblings to enjoy.

Look at this exciting food web activity you can do with your biology students! All you need is a pile of plastic animals, a dark blue poster, string, a silver Sharpie marker, and tape. This food web activity will help your biology students to understand which animals eat which other animals. This is more complicated than the food chain that goes in a straight line that you learn about in elementary school. In real life, some animals eat each other!

Grab the dark blue poster and set it down on the table. Dump the plastic animals out of the bag. I bought a huge bag of plastic animals at a yard sale for fifty cents, so you don’t have to buy the plastic animals new. Goodwill is another source. Or you can borrow the animals from a friend with young children, and give the animals back after this activity.

Students will now set up the animals with the tertiary animals near the top, the secondary animals near the middle, and the primary animals at the bottom of the poster. You might want to include a plastic plant because many animals are herbivores. All primary animals are herbivores, so connect the string from the plant to the herbivore. Tape it down on each end. With a silver marker, draw an arrow indicating that the herbivore eats the plant. (The arrow points to the plant. Unless you want to show how the food energy flows, then do it the opposite direction.)

Continue in this way. The secondary animals eat the primary animals, but some of them also eat plants. One animal can point to more than one food source. This is why the food web looks like a tangled spider web. The tertiary animals eat the secondary animals.

You will notice that an eagle will eat a snake, but that a snake can also eat an eagle! Amazing!

When studying about bacteria in biology, one of my sons decided to build a Lego bacteria. He used two small base plates, which he connected with black Legos representing the cell wall. Green Legos projected out of the cell wall, representing the pili used for locomotion. The flagellum is made of green Legos, and it looks like a tail coming out of the back of the bacterium. The flagellum is also used for locomotion.

The ribosomes are red Legos, and they synthesize protein in the cell. The ribosomes are what powers the bacterium because they take the DNA and turn it into protein for the cell to use. The DNA is made out of blue Legos arranged in a squiggly pattern. Without DNA, the cell would die very quickly because the ribosomes would not be able to make any protein.

Many bacteria are harmful to humans, but other bacteria help humans. People who study bacteria help us to stay healthy, which is one reason why my son wants to be a microbiologist.

If you enjoyed making Lego bacteria, you will love the biology activities in the Unit Study Treasure Vault. If you are homeschooling, your whole family can enjoy biology through the videos and activity demonstrations in the biology section of the Vault!

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